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B-Schools Put Africa on the Curriculum
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TheBlackList CULLECTION
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Feb 08, 2007 15:38 PST
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----- Original Message -----
From: Shelley Corbin
To: shelley corbin
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 2:46 PM
Subject: B-Schools Put Africa on the Curriculum
B-School News February 5, 2007, 4:19PM EST
B-Schools Put Africa on the Curriculum
http://businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2007/bs20070205_479509.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_b-schools
Students are finding great case studies in Africa's developing
economies-both in the countries themselves, and back on campus
by Jane Porter
http://businessweek.com/bios/Jane_Porter.htm
Long relegated to the back shelf by the media, Africa is hot these days. And
not just in the celebrity circles frequented by Bono, Angelina Jolie, and
Oprah. Africa is top-of-mind on B-school campuses, too. Schools such as
Columbia, Yale, and Dartmouth's Tuck are sending their students to places
like Tanzania and South Africa. Meanwhile, B-schools are tweaking their
curricula to include Africa-centric case studies. As far as many MBAs are
concerned, there's no better emerging economy to explore
"There's a huge area of land with a lot to offer in terms of human
resources," says Shamik Narotam, a second-year finance student at the London
Business School who studied in Cape Town this fall. "You can't ignore it
anymore."
Yes, Oprah and her ilk have done their part to thrust Africa into the U.S.
consciousness. (The talk-show host's $40-million leadership school for girls
outside Johannesburg made headlines.) And some MBAs are bringing a do-good
ethos to their African focus. But many recognize the continent is an
emerging market with rich money-making potential, much the way Asia was a
generation ago.
Proliferating Partnerships
"People are going: 'What's the next China? What's the next great thing?'"
says Parker Snowe, head of international programs at Penn's Wharton School
"We want to go see what's going on in Africa, so that when it becomes [a]
mature market, we will be ready."
Exchange programs are proliferating. The University of Cape Town's business
school, for example, has partnerships with 24 schools around the world, 10
of which are from the U.S. (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/2/06, "Africa's
B-School Challenge"). Over the past two years, several top MBA programs have
set up partnerships with African B-schools. And schools are sending students
over not just to sit in the classroom, but to see first-hand how businesses
run.
One such school is Wharton, which last spring dispatched 30 MBAs on a
three-week tour of Senegal, Ghana, and South Africa, where they learned the
lay of the land from local business leaders. The trip included a stop at the
Ghana headquarters of BusyInternet, a company that provides information and
communications technology to African entrepreneurs. There they got a
first-hand look at how access to basic resources like computers, meeting
spaces, and the Internet help local businesses take off. "Unfortunately,
very few people that I know of are developing innovative services," says
Mark Davies, BusyInternet's founder. "Nobody has done what we've done."
Creative Alternatives
For B-school students, Africa presents thorny business challenges, from
poverty to AIDS to racial tensions left over from apartheid. These make for
compelling case studies. Earlier this month in Tanzania, for example,
Bridget Gillich and other first-year Yale MBA students toured a factory
where pipes critical to the delivery of clean water were being produced.
There they discussed the challenges of attracting investors and mustering
enough human capital to stay self-sufficient.
The group of MBAs also met managers at Citibank (C, Standard Bank, and Rand
Merchant Bank. They discussed the challenges of persuading conservative
CFOs-apprehensive about past high rates of inflation-to partake in debt
financing.
They examined cell-phone banking as an alternative to typical "bricks and
mortar" banks for poor rural areas lacking infrastructure like Soweto, the
cluster of South African townships with one of the world's highest rates of
murder, rape, and poverty-where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu's mansions
coexist with shacks alongside dirt roads (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/29/07,
"Meeting All the World's Tech Needs").
African Studies Stateside
Vash Mungal, director of academic programs at the University of Cape Town's
Graduate School of Business, is quick to see the upside of such exposure.
"It's taking their first-world knowledge and knowledge applicable to the
corporate world and applying it to the emerging world."
Back in the U.S., Africa is finding its way into the course load. This year,
students at Washington University's Olin School of Business are working on
an alternative-fuels project that makes use of an indigenous African plant,
while students at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Businessare
working to develop markets for Ethiopia's cash crops, and Northwestern
University's Kellogg Business School students are dipping into a $4.9
million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to research HIV
prevention.
Popular as it is to study Africa in B-schools these days, there's still much
room to translate classroom theory into practice, says BusyInternet's
Davies. "Who's got $50,000 and a spare year to set up a new idea?" he asks.
"There's no angel network that allows you to do that in Africa." Young,
idealistic, and bustling with talent, B-school students may be the closest
thing going.
Porter is a reporter with BusinessWeek in New York.
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